In the Basement

“Capturing the Friedmans.”

“Capturing the Friedmans,” an extraordinary new documentary directed by Andrew Jarecki, is both a meditation on perversion and truth and one of the most heartbreaking films ever made about an American family. Baldly stated, the facts at the center of the movie are these: in 1987, in Great Neck, Long Island, Arnold Friedman, a retired schoolteacher in his fifties who taught computer classes for kids in his home basement, and his youngest son, Jesse, then eighteen, were arrested and charged with committing repeated acts of sexual abuse on boys who attended the classes. Despite its sensational subject, the picture has been made with tact, dedication, and respect for the unending mysteries of family life. For the five Friedmans (father, mother, and three sons), their sense of themselves as a family was central to what was at stake for them as individuals during the crisis. “I’m a Friedman, therefore I am” might have been their slogan, for they rise and fall as a loving and then suffering brood.

Jarecki’s movie owes its existence, it turns out, to the Friedmans’ habit of memorializing themselves in films, tapes, and photographs. The audience searches for clues to the catastrophe in the successive layers of technology: there’s eight-millimetre footage of Arnold Friedman as an ebullient little boy, then photographs of him as a young musician, passing himself off in the Catskills as “Arnito Rey,” Latin bandleader; and then, later, more films and stills of him as an honored schoolteacher and a happy father—a round-shouldered, middle-aged man with glasses and a bemused expression. A lot of the footage shows Arnold and his three sons (David, Seth, and Jesse) horsing around—clowning in crazy costumes, putting on mock playlets, interviewing one another. The nagging hilarity, reminiscent of the Marx Brothers’ delirious shenanigans, was a bond among them as strong as steel. Arnold’s wife, Elaine, however, does not appear to be in on the jokes. A reserved, put-upon woman, she resists the constant pranks as well as the cameras whirring away in her house. Her slogan might be “I’m a Friedman, therefore I struggle to exist.”

The three boys, then in their late teens and early twenties, were home for the Thanksgiving holiday when the unimaginable happened. The police busted in, searched the basement, and found a stack of child-pornography magazines. It seems that the Nassau County authorities had been tipped off by postal inspectors, who had been monitoring Arnold’s mail. The police then interviewed the children who attended the computer classes—boys reportedly ranging in age from seven to twelve—and a collective tale of violation emerged. Jarecki gives us enough of the local TV news and tabloid coverage to bring back the scandal in all its dismaying squalor. But his real interest is in the memory of each person—including policemen, defense and prosecuting attorneys, and court officials—as it has been shaped over the years in the telling and the retelling. The movie is a stunning demonstration of the subjectivity of recollection. Not even “Rashomon” itself is more ambiguous or many-sided.

All through the arrests and trials, the oldest son, David, made videotapes, which play a central role in the movie. Of the three boys, David was perhaps the closest to his father—the one who drew most directly on his father’s humor and love of imposture. As an adult, he became a successful professional clown, an entertainer at family parties in Manhattan. We see him in 1988, during the trials, taping himself as he sits on his bed in his underwear, pouring out his rage and bewilderment to the camera. “If you’re not me, you’re not supposed to be watching this,” he says. But why make the video if there was not an intention to tell the family story somewhere, someday? David is a showman, an ironic entertainer. He also videotaped family dinners, a Seder, conversations in the kitchen and the car. He recorded the scenes not only to tell the story but also, perhaps, to assert some measure of control as the family fell apart under pressure from the police and the community. And he may have wanted to capture what he considered a betrayal: the refusal of his mother to support her husband (who pleaded guilty on some counts) and then her insistence that Jesse, who claimed innocence, plead guilty, too, so as to avoid the maximum sentence. Interviewed in the present, David, sad-eyed and vengeful, loyal to his father, is still living the torment of the family breakup—living it every time he goes out to entertain children as a clown.

What’s astonishing about the videos is that they turn from comedy to tragedy and then back again. Even on the day Jesse is given a sentence of six to eighteen years in prison, the boys are larking together—an act of solidarity which a police officer in the case, years later, takes as a sign that Jesse lacked remorse. (It doesn’t occur to him that the joking might have been a defiant protestation of innocence.) Within the family, there are taunts and threats as well as jokes: at dinner, all three boys gang up on Elaine while Arnold sits quietly and begs them in a whisper to desist. The boys, clinging desperately to the illusion of the Friedmans’ family health, refuse to believe that their dad is guilty, and he refuses to speak. The entire fantastic mess unfolds before our eyes with the power of some appalling Biblical story or one of the bloodier Greek myths—the House of Atreus reincarnated as a middle-class Jewish family in Great Neck.

Jarecki and the film’s editor, Richard Hankin, shift back and forth in time, intercutting contemporary interviews with family footage and trial records. In the end, the filmmakers capture the Friedmans but not, alas, the truth, which keeps slipping into the distance like a silvery fish; it quivers and flashes, but we can’t quite see it in its entirety. Arnold Friedman, we find out, was certainly a pedophile—there were previous instances of molestation that he admitted to. But what happened in the basement? A man sitting with his face in the dark insists that he was raped years earlier. Another man, photographed in closeup, fully lit, says that nothing happened at all. Back in 1987 and 1988, the police put the case together from the discovery of the pornographic magazines and the testimony of the children. But there wasn’t any physical evidence—no semen or blood on the children’s clothes, no bruises, no complaints at the time from the kids, some of whom had, before the arrests, enrolled for another round of classes. Were the charges exaggerated? Completely false? The investigative journalist Debbie Nathan talks of hysteria, panic, group pressures. One parent says he was urged by other parents to get his kid to confess. And yet the police, the prosecutors, and the judge, interviewed now, come off as cautious and temperate people. After watching the movie, audiences will debate for hours about who is telling the truth, who is telling a half-truth, and who wants to believe so passionately in something false that it becomes a vivid memory to be defended against every hint of doubt.

Seth Friedman chose not to be interviewed for the film. Jesse served thirteen years and now, ravaged in appearance, is a free man. Arnold, sentenced to ten to thirty years, died in prison; the death itself is part of a generous gesture that becomes one of the many revelations offered late in the film. Yet Arnold remains a cipher, a guilty man hounded by the rival furies of shameful desire and family responsibility. In the end, his wife was one of his principal victims. Now in her seventies, Elaine talks of her bewilderment, of her distance from her husband, of being lied to. Touched, we try to imagine the unbearable solitude of her married life. “Capturing the Friedmans” reaffirms the family as the inescapable cauldron of great drama—as the birthplace and feeding ground of the most powerful emotions, including perverse sexual desire, and as the site of reconciliation and solace, too.

Andrew Jarecki started out as a musician and was the founder of Moviefone, which he sold to America Online in 1999. “Capturing the Friedmans,” made with assistance from HBO and many angels, is his first feature-length film, a work that nevertheless demonstrates the audacity, the evenhandedness, the sense of detail and structural power worthy of such accomplished documentary filmmakers as Marcel Ophuls and Frederick Wiseman. I’m not sure how Jarecki is going to top “Capturing the Friedmans.” To begin your career with a masterpiece is so remarkable a feat that one can only hope Jarecki finds another subject as rich as this family, which was obsessed with itself but needed a filmmaker to begin to see itself at all. ♦

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